Subject: BHA: Anti-materialist pessimism/optimism is not the answer
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 21:35:45 -0000


Hi Dick,
To me the first step on the long road to a possible new world order is
to create/develop a materialist understanding of what is going on in the
world system.  You are right to point out that we already have some of
that understanding in place, or potentially in place, in terms of
analysis of the ownership, policies (insofar as we can surmise them),
and actions of the transnational corporations.  More problematic is the
ideological problem of how to enthuse people with the vision and belief
that a new world order - what I would call socialism - is possible.
This problem will not be solved in short order, and requires a
determined struggle against dogmatism and scepticism.  Philosophically,
I have a problem with the view that materialism is not necessary to this
process (I don't know whether you're saying this but Mervyn is and so is
RB).  The problem is that if one rejects the need for a materialist
philosophical approach to the task of building the new world order one
is left only with ethical arguments against the existing system - which
is more or less the level at which the oppositional movement is at in
this period.  I am not knocking ethical arguments.  However, it is
materialist arguments that are overwhelmingly the most important aspect
of bringing about qualitative change in the world - ethical arguments
are not (nearly) in and of themselves sufficient (if you don't know what
sort of a world you're in then ethical arguments don't make sense to you
- viz for example the racist position towards immigrants and asylum
seekers that most British people have got).  This anti-materialism or
non-materialism seems to be a major weakness in meta-reality and in DCR.
Phil  

Hi Phil,

Although the Communist ideal of a new world order was indeed inspiring,
as you point out, it failed.  I think the American neo-con ideal of an
American Empire with a Pax Americana has already failed -- more pox than
pax.  What might very well succeed in replacing the international system
of war-like nation states are the multi-national corporations --
international plutocracy.  I don't want that for my children (they
aren't likely to be among the plutocrats).  

I'm not saying that a new world order is impossible.  A "global good
society," however, does not seem probable.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Walden [mailto:phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk] 
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 11:51 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war, Bourne


Hi Dick,
Thanks for the info about Randolph Bourne.  As far as I am aware, the
Bolshevik leaders of the Soviet workers' state of 1917-18 did not think
in terms of "sovereignty", but in terms of international working class
unity as a precondition for human flourishing.  Bukharin correctly tried
to develop this unity by advocating revolutionary (guerrilla) war
against the advancing German army, in order to offer the German working
class the opportunity to side with the Soviet workers' state (and
thereby with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union) rather than
with their 'own' German bourgeoisie.  After a confused and
militarily-pressured process of debate within the Bolshevik Central
Committee, Bukharin's proposal was voted down and a decision was taken
to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and make peace with Germany, in the
hope that socialism could be consolidated in the single state of the
Soviet Union.  It was a case of nationalism winning out over
internationalism.  If Bukharin's view had prevailed, humanity would in
all likelihood have been spared an immense amount of social pain.
Whether lessons have been learnt for the world of 2003 remains to be
seen. Best regards,
Phil   


Hi Phil,

Randloph Bourne was an up and coming journalist and intellectual in the
period just before and during WWI.  He had been a follow of John Dewey,
but broke with him over Dewey's support of the War.  He died in the
influenza epidemic, either just before or just after the end of the War.

By "state" I mean what used to be called (incorrectly) the
"nation-state."  Many states are "multi-national."  States, whether
capitalist or workers' states, define sovereignty in terms of the right
to go to war to protect (or advance) their "national interests."  The
modern state does not exist in isolation, but can exist only within a
system of states, each proclaiming sovereignty as a right to go to war.

For me, "war" and "state" have to be defined together.  Each have to be
understood in terms of an international order of sovereign states.  A
number of people, including Marx and Bush, have sought to bring about a
"new world order."  So far, these attempts do not seem to have
succeeded.

Best regards,

Dick

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Walden [mailto:phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 9:00 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war, Abraham


Hi Dick,
I would ask you for a couple of bits of clarification.  I was interested
by your view that war tends to decrease internal conflicts within a
state.  By "state" do you mean capitalist state or states in general (in
my view the Soviet Union of November 1917 was not a capitalist state but
a workers' state)?  And by "war" do you mean capitalist war or war in
general (Marxists generally hold that war can be revolutionary)?  Of
course, these questions would not have occurred to Hegel.  (Don't know
who Bourne is or when s/he lived). Phil 



Hi James,

One of the advantages of a list is that we are forced to be more
explicit about what we mean, and can review exactly what we said before.
I think Bourne, and Hegel, are partially right, and partially wrong.  A
state can be "healthy" only in a metaphorical sense -- it isn't really
an organism.  So they are wrong.  But the metaphor suggests a number of
propositions about the state that I think are right.  Such as: war tends
to decrease internal conflicts within a state; war tends to empower
officials of the state; war increases the legitimacy of the state in the
eyes of the people; etc.

>From my persective, the good effects of war upon the state are
outweighed by the evil effects, not just in terms of injury, death, and
destruction, but also in some of the very things that constitute the
metaphorical "health" of the state.  Truth might be the first casualty
of war, but genuine democracy is not far behind, even in wars that are
honestly fought to "save" democracy.

Some further comments after your comments about Kierkegaard.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Daly [mailto:james.irldaly-AT-ntlworld.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 8:59 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


Hi Dick, and all in the "nature good/bad" thread,

One of the drawbacks of a list exchange is that unlike in a face-to-face
conversation ambiguities are not quickly resolved. For instance, Dick,
you write "I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, 'War is the
health of the state.' " Of course it has to be taken seriously -- Hegel
also said words to that effect. But is it right? And is a healthy state
a good thing? If one accepts the Hobbesian view of permanent nature --
not changed, only organised for maximum utility by the state -- it is.


I think Kierkegaard saw the particularity of Benthamite hedonism as the
first "stage on life's way", and the *Hegelian* universality of
state-conformist "ethics" (Sittlichkeit) as the second. Despair,
conscious or not -- Kierkegaard compared it to sickness, of which one
can be a carrier without knowing it -- is failure to reach the third
stage, that of faith, for Kierkegaard the Christian religious.

For this I would substitute, despite Kierkegaard's protests, the more
over-arching secular term "ontological", seen as the existential, the
particular human being facing one's finitude -- death -- and trying to
reconcile it with the infinitude we are capable of imagining and even
thinking, which goes beyond even the immensities of astronomical space
and time. "Immortal longings" are a possible *possessive* (having)
response. "Progress" has been both a bourgeois and a Marx*ist* secular
response. I agree with Walter Benjamin's critique of that, and his
substitution for it of the more spiritual concept of "redemption" (a
phrase found in *Marx*).

MY COMMENTS:

Although I see Kierkegaard as one of the good guys, his writing has
never "grabbed" me the way it does others.  I see the "aesthetic," the
"ethical," and the "religious" as different aspects of a full human
life, rather than as stages of human development.  Nor am I wholly
comfortable with your substitution of the "ontological" for the
"religious."  I can see myself praying to God, even to Krisha, but not
to "being."

Nor do I see "progress" and "redemption" in either/or terms.  Why not
both?

YOU WROTE:

Faith for Kierkegaard meant something like "trust" -- Abraham is his
model. Faith is akin to hope, but not hope for something finite. It is
more like what is expressed in the phrase "Everything has a reason".
Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty. It is a
trust that the universe of being is responsive to human values, and that
human goodness is not ultimately wasted, as it was for the Sophists, for
whom Gyges was a model: having a magic ring which gave him invisibility
and hence impunity, he murdered the King and married the Queen (as a
real life Greek general named Gyges in fact did).


PS -- "Gaines" was part of an elaborate joke based on someone's repeated
misspellings of Mervyn's name, to which Mervyn replied by signing
himself "Marvell", without anyone except Tobin and me seeming to notice.

I REPLY:

I thought it was kinda funny, but kept quiet out of fear of giving
offense -- not sure just where.  As a non-Bhaskarian critical realist, I
always feel like something of an outsider on this list, even though I
have always been given warm reassurances whenever I have expressed this.

Anyway, back to SK.  His admiration for Abraham has always been a source
of my dislike for him.  I have read many sophisticated theological and
philosophical apologies for Abraham's behavior, but I don't buy them.
He's a jerk.  (Sorry, I probably have given offense by this, but I am
being quite restrained in using the term "jerk.")

Best regards,

Dick



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 2:10 PM
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


> Hi Mervyn,
>
> To say that love triumphs over evil sounds to me much more like an
expression of hope than a statement of accomplished fact.  That is my
hope, but I don't believe that love has already triumphed, or that it
will do inevitably.  To say that it will necessarily triumph sounds so
much like a "force of history" argument, something like the belief that
a global communist society is inevitable.
>
> Perhaps my reading of the historical record is different from yours,
but it seems to me that one of the major contributors to fellow-feeling,
or love, within a collectivity, is their common need to protect
themselves from external enemies.  It is a commonplace that a major task
of the political representatives of a collectivity is to organize it for
protection against other, similarly organized, collectivities --
"tribes," "city-states," "nation-states," "alliances," "empires."  I
take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, "War is the health of
the state."
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mervyn Hartwig [mailto:mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 1:18 PM
> To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
>
>
> Hi Dick,
>
> But it hasn't, i.e. notwithstanding inter-(and intra-)specific
aggression, species have proliferated and flourished. If aggression
dominated both inter- and intra- the whole show would come to a halt (as
of course it might yet owing to contingent aggression within a
contingently powerful species, i.e. ours; it would remain the case that
there could be no process of biological evolution if love did not
triumph over evil, Eros over Thanatos).
>
> Mervyn
>
>
>
>
>  "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu> writes
> >Hi Mervyn,
> >
> >You wrote:
> >
> >"One can argue that, given that biological evolution proceeds, it
must
> >be the case that co-operation, care etc prevails over 
> >self-preservation, aggression etc within species."
> >
> >But isn't it possible that conflict among (between)different 
> >communities may prevail over co-operation among (between)them, even
as
> >this conflict requires high degrees of co-operation within each of 
> >these communities?
> >
> >I don't write this out of any basic disagreement with the other 
> >arguments for the either the existence or the fundamental goodness
of
> >something (not yet fully specified, perhaps) that we can point to
with
> >the heuristic concept, "human nature."
> >
> >Regards,
> >
>
>
>
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>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>




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